The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything ... Fast

Life requires tradeoffs, and there’s nothing wrong with exploring something new, learning a lot, and then deciding to explore something else.

Acquisition?

Rapid skill acquisition is a process—a way of breaking down the skill you’re trying to acquire into the smallest possible parts, identifying

expert-level performance takes, on average, ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to achieve.

many things aren’t fun until you’re good at them. Every skill has what I call a frustration barrier—a period of time in which you’re horribly unskilled, and you’re painfully aware of that fact.

Rapid skill acquisition has four major steps:

Deconstructing a skill into the smallest possible subskills;
Learning enough about each subskill to be able to practice intelligently and self-correct during practice;
Removing physical, mental, and emotional barriers that get in the way of practice;
Practicing the most important subskills for at least twenty hours.

Don’t expect overnight results. Do expect that your total time invested will be much, much less than it would otherwise be if you jumped into the process without a strategy.

taking considerably less time than it would typically take to learn a skill if you went about the process as most people do: blindly, haphazardly, and inconsistently.

The desire for instant gratification is one of the primary reasons people don’t acquire new skills very quickly.

Deconstructing a skill into the smallest possible subskills;
Learning enough about each subskill to be able to practice intelligently and self-correct during practice;
Removing physical, mental, and emotional barriers that get in the way of practice;
Practicing the most important subskills for at least twenty hours.

Rapid skill acquisition is a process—a way of breaking down the skill you’re trying to acquire into the smallest possible parts, identifying which of those parts are most important, then deliberately practicing those elements first.